Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Countess Elfriede Taveggi returns home




November 29, 1915

Countess Elfriede Taveggi arrived last week from Europe to New York on board the Ryndam, reports the Marquise de Fontenoy.  The countess is related to the Hohenzollerns, a member of the Italian nobility, and "a native of Hoboken, New Jersey."

Elfriede is the daughter of Theodore Heitmeyer, a native of Hoboken, who began his career as a "poor apprentice boy in a tannery and died at the head of one of the greatest leather concerns in America."   The firm became an international concern, and, until the outbreak of the world war, the firm had offices in England, Germany, and Austria.

The countess and her husband, Count Joachim Taveggi, live in Kripp on the Rhine near Bonn, where the count is "in charge of the Heitmeyer leather interests."

Count Gioacchino lived for many years in America, and "underwent many hardships and followed many trades, including those of riding master and wine tout," before he met and fell in love with Theodore Heitmeyer's daughter, Elfriede.

The late Theodore Heitmeyer is the grandson of the late Princess Friederike of Hohenzollern, who died in 1906. She was the aunt of the late King Carol of Romania and the Countess of Flanders.

Princess Friederike's mother was Antoinette Murat, who married Prince Karl of Hohenzollern in 1808.  The wedding ceremony took place at the Tuileries, and the bride was given away by Emperor Napoleon, "who just before the wedding had created her a princess of France."

Princess Friederike married her cousin, the Marchese Joachim Pepoli, at Bologna in 1844, the son of Marie Letizia Murat and Guido Taddeo Marchese Pepoli.

The Pepoli family is one of the "very old patrician families of Bologna."  The Marchese took "an active part in the wars of 1848 and 1849 against the Austrians," which eventually led to the "transformation" of the various states into the kingdom of Italy.    Friederike and her husband had one child, Countess Antoinette Pepoli, who married Count Carlo Taveggi.   They had two children, a daughter who married Baron Geyr von Schweppenberg, who was killed last spring at the front in France.

Antoinette's son, Count Joachim Taveggi, after "all sorts of financial reverses in Europe," came to the United States, where he met and married Miss Elfriede Heitmeyer.   They have several children, including a son, Robert, and a daughter, Antoinette.

Until he married, Count Taveggi received an allowance from his grandmother, Princess Friederike, "through the German Embassy" in Washington, D.C.

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